iCloud Photos on Windows 11 causes excessive data and memory usage

On August 1, 2026, iCloud Photos started syncing photos with my Windows 11 local library and didn't stop until I got an email from my Internet provider that in 2 days I had used triple my allowed data for the entire month. I killed the iCloud Photos process and it stopped clobbering my data allowance. Since then, it will start up again pretty much daily, and if I didn't have Zabbix set up to tell me my memory was being page filed at inadvisable rate, I wouldn't notice that it's doing it again. I have 64GB of memory, so I'm guessing that for most people this would show up as high CPU usage. I haven't figured out for sure what triggers it, but here are a couple of data points:

• Apple rolled out a new iCloud version on July 30, the day before this first time event happened.
• I suspect that it is triggered by simply accessing media from my iCloud Photos directory.

Is this happening to anyone else? If you're reading this, store your files locally and in iCloud, and you haven't checked your August data usage with your Internet provider, a quick check couldn't hurt anything.